


shine razor eyes

by LadyRaincloud



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (in a way. a canon typical way), Assisted Suicide, Basira and Daisy are a pack and I have so many feelings about that, Gun Violence, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, I had hoped to post it before but. I didn't, I love Daisy and she deserves a good death, Mercy Killing, No beta we die like archival assistants, Other, PWP (posted without proofing), and if no one gets what they deserve in canon I am going to write it for her myself, canon typical dehumanisation and loss of self, it's just straight up not a nice fic, please do heed the tags, probably canon divergent as of today's episode, the death is very much not imagined, the graphic violence is mostly imagined or real past events alluded to but it's still well graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:13:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26511976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyRaincloud/pseuds/LadyRaincloud
Summary: An examination of lone hunting and pack bonds.
Relationships: Basira Hussain & Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Basira Hussain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner, depending on how you want to read it - Relationship
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	shine razor eyes

**Author's Note:**

> I had wanted to post this before the episode dropped but, as noted in the tags, I never really succeed with a plan. Listening (and having my vain hope that 'no one gets what they deserves' maybe doesn't apply to Daisy getting to die as herself shattered) can be my reward for posting it.
> 
> Title from Animal Impulses by IAMX. I imagine many Daisira fics have titles from the same. I really should read some sometime.

The Hunter senses their approach even before she catches their scent and hears their hearts beating as they draw nearer. She’d come here to stalk just another prey, but she’s known on every hunt, she would be followed eventually to wherever she hunted.

Fleeing isn’t a possibility, and even if it were, it’s not one the Hunter wants to do. She doesn’t flee anyone, and if they’re not trying to flee her, well, that’s their mistake. She does keep moving though, leads them further into the dark and the close narrow spaces where the alleys taper to a dead end where you had previously thought you could see the light of a way out. The places that still make her breath come shallow and her heart beat quicker in her throat, but this time, she will not fear.

She’s the one to be feared now.

The Hunter had thought it might be here. She’d been followed into this domain once before, but different then. She’d gone in the same as she is now, but she hadn’t remained the same in there. This time, though, she knows, she’s going in with the blood still in her teeth and her claws, and she can keep that with her. She’d thought, before, she’d remembered herself in a place like this. She is so much more than herself now.

She recognises the rank scents of fear, the sweet sharp smell that laces through all the scents of her prey.  _ Familiar _ prey. The entwined aromas of their fear overlap the smell of the other one with them. Even without the scent of her, curiously – but not really – absence of fear, she senses the presence, as familiar to her as her own blood thrumming through her veins. She takes the rising knowledge and pushes it down in her lungs, lets the short sharp breathing of the chase and the adrenaline singing through her overwhelm it. She won't be distracted from the hunt.

The predator who had stalked her dreams, back when she still dreamt – who watched her and drank in her anger and confusion and her fear, that she hated the taste of in her own mouth and hated more knowing someone else was feeding on it too – the watcher, back again to look on some more, well, let him now – he fears her still, and the savage joy of that races through her. The hitching of his breath, his pulse thundering, his pupils blown wide when she turns to look at her pursuers – her skin hums, every nerve lights up, when she feels his fear of her again.

The Hunter was not used to being prey. Now, the watcher is the prey. This time, she’ll be the one to feed on  _ his _ fear.

She’d imagined a long time ago how sweet and warm his blood would taste when she ripped out his throat. He’s different now, though. Maybe it would be bitter, would coat her teeth with an inhuman stain, but she imagines the snap of his bones between her jaws would be no less satisfying.

He has a protective hand on the other man, the one who’s still human, like he’s his  _ pet _ , and in turn the human one has his fist clenched in the fabric of the watcher’s sleeve.  _ Pathetic _ . He looks at her with eyes full of fear and of fury. She’s used to that. The other one, though, the one who isn’t human, his eyes shine with sorrow even through his fear. With  _ pity _ . She remembers his eyes alight with that same look, the only thing she could see when she was trapped in the cold and the dark and  her own mind, and she hates him more for it. Remembers that look lingering after, when he looked at her weakened, like she never should have been, never would have been if it weren’t for him. 

She stokes the rage and hate rising in her, the growl tearing its way, barbed and ragged, from deep in her chest. The howl of the hunt coursing through her tastes better than memory.

The roaring of her own blood sings in her ears, drowning out the words he’s speaking.

She’ll kill his pet first, tear him apart while he watches. She’ll do it slowly, taking her time to rend flesh from bone and taste the same blood he’ll choke on, while the watcher can do nothing but witness and narrate.

His breath catches at that, his lips twitching as he  stumbles on the words. The Hunter’s snarl takes a triumphant edge. She tastes his fear rush up sharp again, and however changed he might be, its raw tang is just the same as when it had been the two of them and a dead  _ thing _ in the woods, his pulse beating in his throat rabbit-quick against her fingers and then his own blade.

She might have missed her chance then, but she can’t regret anything that led her where she is now, to the endless hunt. And besides, she wouldn’t have been able to take her time with him then. Now, she can make sure he feels all the fear.

The Hunter stares them down and she laughs, the sound silvery and bright to her ears, dancing over the burning coals of the guttural growling still convulsing through her.

She’s still laughing while the familiar presence grows stronger, until it’s something she can’t ignore, until someone else pushes between them and walks towards the Hunter. Someone who isn’t prey.

Someone who was her pack, and still is.

The hunter’s laughter tapers off in the air, the rumbling in her chest quieting with it.

Her  packmate , her partner, keeps walking towards her, a gun trained in her direction and her footsteps measured and careful, as if she’s bracing herself as though fearing the Hunter will lunge, even though they both know she’s not going to. She tastes no fear from her. And besides, the gun is off its mark, if she fired now it would go a few inches wide of the Hunter. She knows her partner is too good a shot for that to be anything other than deliberate.

Her voice is measured and calm, the tremble that the Hunter can sense going through the air never reaching her partner’s vocal chords. ‘Daisy.’

The Hunter and her partner stare each other down. She can take in every detail of her; her senses heightened by the Hunt, she can smell the sweat and dirt from her partner’s pursuit of her, the stain left on her by the domains she’s travelled across, everything she’s had to go through without the Hunter at her back, clinging to the fibres of her clothes and ingrained in her skin, laced through every halting breath she takes. The familiar call of her partner’s blood sings through the Hunter, races in time with her own. Pack reach for one another.

‘ Basira .’

The Hunter’s voice leaves her ragged and hoarse, roughened from disuse for anything other than the snarling and the laughter that had been all she’d needed. She hears it as her partner must, sees herself as her partner takes in every detail of her in turn. The Hunter’s skin is coated in the streaked blood of so many different prey and her clothes ragged and stained with the filth of pursuit, her stance hunched over, crouched low ready to run and lunge and attack, her pupils dilated so wide to be able to see every detail of her surroundings and her prey that her eyes must be fully black.

Her partner had never seen the Hunter so animal, but the way she looks at her, the way her body calls across the space between them to her, is the same as it ever was. They are still pack.

She had protected the Hunter when she was weak, too, but that had never been an act of charity or pity. That had been because they were pack. They took care of their own. And now, memories stirring somewhere in her, the Hunter understands that that’s what her partner has come to do. 

They’re standing in front of one another now, the muzzle of the gun nearly brushing the Hunter’s ribs. She reaches out. Relaxes the joints in her fingers from the claws they’d been curved into since the last time the two of them had seen one another, the release of tension sending stabs of pain through the tendons all the way up her arm, and lays her hand on the barrel of the gun. It’s warm beneath her fingers. She imagines it absorbing the heat of her partner’s body, carried close to her to protect her when she was without her pack to do that.

The Hunter draws  the gun  closer,  her partner’s hand unresisting, and  presses the muzzle against her chest. She wonders if  her partner can feel the throb of her heartbeat against it, steady and finally calming for the first time in so long. 

She looks up at her partner, their fingers still laced together on the grip of the gun.

‘Promise.’ the Hunter whispers, a reminder rather than a request, and notes as if from far away that the last tattered remnants of the growl are gone from her voice.

Her partner’s dark eyes flash in the half light, and the gun flashes with the shot. 

She feels it shudder with the recoil against their entwined fingers, her grip slackening almost immediately, as the bullet tears through her, ripping apart the scar that blossoms on her shoulder. Daisy reaches for Basira as her knees buckle. 

‘I promised,’  Basira whispers as she catches Daisy when she stumbles forward, lowers them both to the ground with her arms around her, resting their foreheads together.

Her breath stirs the matted hair that’s not plastered by blood to Daisy’s head as she mutters over and over ‘ I’m here, I’m here ’, the sensation of her lips still moving against Daisy’s skin after she stops being able to hear the words. 

She holds Daisy closer as her blood leaves her body and soaks them both, and Daisy imagines it seeping into Basira’s skin, down to her bones, some lasting part of her to stay with her and cling to her, protect her in the only way she can, to remind her what she’s fighting for.

For now, though, she slumps against  Basira until the last sensation, of her partner’s arms around her, the only pack member she ever wanted holding her close, fades, and she is gone.

Basira holds the body of her partner for a long time after it’s left empty, kneeling in the pooling blood supporting the still-warm weight of the only person she ever trusted, all that she’s left with after the task with which she was entrusted. She cannot be unseen, but she isn’t watched or known. These moments are her own, as every moment from now will be.

**Author's Note:**

> If you read this, thank you! I hadn't posted anything for probably over a year, and hadn't written anything for months until at 4AM on a Wednesday I could not stop thinking about this (yes, profoundly unoriginal, I do not think this is a hot take) scenario I've been lovingly thinking about for months now, decided to make a note of it in a text to myself so it would leave me alone, and accidentally wrote a fic across a lot of texts. Like a fool. But it was so great for me to actually write again, so if you read to the end, thank you so much, and I hope you enjoyed it!
> 
> Also, apologies to the two friends I contacted with the URGENT QUERY with no context of whether a knife or a gun is more of a homoerotic murder method. We all agreed what I already knew in my heart, that it's obviously a knife, but then I couldn't face changing it and also couldn't see Basira using a knife over a gun, so that was wasted advice, if very enjoyable conversation.


End file.
